CIPHER EXPERT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 301, 21 December 1933, Page 3

CIPHER EXPERT

TRAILING OF SMUGGLERS AN AMERICAN WOMAN NEW YORK, Noveinbcr 22. Many criminal syndicates, engaged in the liquor, narcotic, and alien smuggling traffic, owe their downfall to a woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Friedman, of thc United States Intelligence Department. The old controversy as to whether or not Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays and concealed his real message in a cipher first interested Mrs. Friedman in tho subject. It whs an easy step from literary to military ciphers, and the war found the youthful enthusiast in the employ of the United States Government, handling secret messages. Later, she was trans ferrod to her present position. She has trained her own staff. Only rarely is she unable to decipher secret code messages used by law violators. Until recently the illicit liquor traffic kept her busy. Now that Prohibition has gone, there has been a startling increase in the narcotic and alien traflic. Great international organisations, she says, control both organisations directed by men of the highest intelligence. Their profits run into . millions. They must develop cunning to the last degree to crane detection. Their ciphers are very complex, but few are untranslatable “A ten-year-old boy could write a single message that the most highlytrained export could not decipher, but it is another matter when it comes to devising one that can bo put to everyday use,” she says. “Sometimes we do find a single message that baffles us, but when we have a series of messages, even thc most complex yields, 'i our jewel smufffflcr seldom

I has to resort to ciphers to communicate with his associates. The tim«» element is not so important, nor is th/ scope of operation so vast.” | Referring to tho cipher in Edga Allen Poe’s “Gold Bug,” Mrs. Fried man says: “He had a real flair foi the business, but in his day, decoding was not so highly technical. Today it is a real science.”